Hacker News Reader

Comment by margorczynski | Hacker News Reader

But how many experts do you need? Most dev jobs are mostly repetitive plumbing and those might disappear very fast because 1 dev + LLM >= 5 devs without. So what we'll see is an increase in company margins and an elimination of a large swathe of the middle class.

The alternative theory is that if everyone can now quickly create systems multiple companies and competing products will pop off which will drive down the margins instead but creating a compelling product requires much more than just software engineering skills.

Either way this doesn't look great for devs, especially the ones that are entering the workforce now or will be in the nearest future.

View on HN

People are conflating Copilot with evaporating demand.

Why pay for a CRUD interface when the chat interface does everything for you?

It’s App Store 2009 out there. Few are taking Assistants and “GPTs” seriously.

Programmers who do front end work can adapt. All that CRUD stuff hardly makes sense in isolation - it’s meant to make other people productive, usually admins. If the chatbot can do the admin’s job, which is a lot easier and more tenuous than the programmer’s, well that’s what’s going to happen.

>> Most dev jobs are mostly repetitive plumbing

Those jobs should go away. Basically, the elimination of anything boring is ultimately a net good for humanity.

Only if you provide an alternative way for the newly unemployed to earn a living. Otherwise you just get crime, hunger and eventually war.

When you consider how early we are in the evolution of software and the role it can play in our professional and personal lives, this seems like one of the easier problems to solve though.

Political problems are much harder to solve than technical ones.

It doesn't follow that reducing efficiency helps in the long run. If producing a good or service takes 10X less work than it used to, that good or service will become cheaper. The only force that can stop this is regulation.

Jobs aren’t distributed out of some cookie jar. They are needs and wants and obligations that other people will pay to have fulfilled or taken off their hands. Figure out how to solve those problems and you’ll have all the work you could ever ask for.

Hey over there. I’m very much grateful for the privilege of this boring job, which is not 100% of my job, but a huge part of it. Grateful because it allows me to feed a family of four. I’m sure in your Musk’esque utopia without boring work is place enough for all mankind. But please, don’t forget to draft a bridge that will bring us all over there and not just a bunch of filthy rich Silicon Valley assholes. Because that wouldn’t be a utopia. Thank you.

That is a fair assessment. I am probably parroting Musk here a little. However, your main issue is access to food and resources, not boring work. I can't see why the price of everything goes to zero if there is no cost to make it.

Because there's a finite amount of resources so almost always you'll run into scarcity?

Very well the wages might fall much quicker than the costs so for a handful it will be beneficial, for the rest not so much.

It might become way easier to start companies, as there won't be a need to nearly as many people. It might end up being more of a equalizing force in the end.

Neat idea. That solves everything.

Oh, one quick thing. I'm sure it's nothing, but I'm a bit slow.

How do you get new experts if no one gets to do the junior work that gives them the experience to become an expert?

Unions and apprenticeships?

Firat it was people pushing plows, then horses pulled them, and now machines do the work a hundred people used to do.

This technology is no different.

but the ability to get horses to pull carts is not tied to expert knowledge of hand-pushing plows, neither is machinery to horse-pulling. This is not really the case for AI

I guess in the ideal world, everyone just does what they want, since everything will be so cheap. Enjoy chess? Study it and play against other humans. AI will of course crush you in any game. Enjoy accounting, radiology or programming? Same thing.

Move to a higher level of abstraction and architecture. We’re leaving the era of hand wiring data structures and program logic the same way we left behind the era of hand wiring ICs and discrete components. Different skills will be needed.

UML rises again! Maybe we will even have a unified process one day for creating software - a rational one no less.

I’d rather be in the textile industry post industrial revolution than before it. The fortunes made during the age of mechanization make all of history’s kings and merchants paupers by comparison.

Everyone thinks they'd be the king and not the pauper. The luddites starved on the street because they were kicked from their properties with nowhere to live and no way to earn a living. The next generation of kids worked on the textile machines and commonly got turned to hamburger, all while the robber barons made obscene wealth. It mostly worked out over time because the populace fought things like unions and social safety nets. But hey, don't worry, the modern day tech barons are telling us we don't need those pesky 'expensive' social safety nets, I'm sure out of the kindness of their blackened hearts they'll provide for us all when robots replace our jobs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com